Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2703310" data-attributes="member: 7240">Agreed!And by that, I suppose you mean that because you are good at geometry, you are glad the rules let that advantage be brought to bear but because you are less charismatic, you want the rules to inhibit people from bringing that particular advantage to bear.What I am saying here is that I do not buy the idea that it is bad for real world skills to make you a better D&D player. Games, of any kind, would not be fun if one couldn't shine using one's real world talents. Any game that successfully abolished the influence of real world talents would essentially just turn into a version of Chutes and Ladders. You don't like games in which charisma and articulateness matter. I do. My idea of a great board game is Diplomany -- a game that is half geometric relations and half social skills. That's a combo that works for me. I like D&D for much the same reason. You don't have to play D&D the way I do, of course, but I just don't buy the idea that the rules don't include the flexibility to play out social interactions at variable levels of abstraction. I agree with this idea. My players' social skills matter in my games. But so do their rolls on charisma-based skills.Whoa! Here we completely part company. The idea that changing a monster or introducing a new monster requires advance notice to the players does not fit at all with my idea of a fun game. I would kick my GM for doing that. Why limit the sense of discovery and challenge like that?It sounds like your games tend to value "balance/fairness" (translation: only valuing a narrow range of human talents/skills) above a lot of things I consider to be of equal or greater importance.Actually, I am with you here. Nerfing a quarter of the skills without notifying the players would be grossly irresponsible on the part of a GM.As I said above, a character, at any given moment, is a composite of his rolls, his stats and his player, all entangled in a complex but hopefully fulfilling way.I agree. That's why I'm opposed to removing them.That's not exactly true. Changing the DC to climb a wall from one where all the PCs can make it up to one where only the fighter and rogue can is not an equally felt change. Similarly, switching a monster's DR from 10/magic to 10/- is going to privilege characters with two-handed weapons and severely inhibit those with light weapons. I'm not in favour of arbitrary DMing. I'm in favour of fair DMing. DMs can allow people to play out NPC interactions in a way that is fair and even-handed. And it's not like bad/arbitrary DMing will go away when it comes to social skills just because you eliminate playing out the interaction; DMs will still have to determine a circumstance modifier for Bluff and Diplomacy skills regardless based on situation and the basis of the character's arguments.That's why I use the example of geometry and flanking. Some people never get good at that, knowing where to put themselves, factoring in the other PCs' and monsters' movement rates, etc.Fair in what sense? You guys have a particular definition of "fair" that sounds an awful lot like "advantageous to me." What you seem to want is a game that confers advantages for things you are good at while shielding you from disadvantages that might accrue from things you are not so good at. Would your version of D&D be "fair" for an articulate person with crappy math, geometry, tactics and spatial relations? To be honest with you, I would have some difficulty with a player who decided to be the bard spokesperson for a party who, in real life, couldn't string two articulate sentences together. I, as the GM, and the other players would end up having their suspension of disbelief damaged every time there was an NPC interaction. Would it be "fair" to the charmless individual? Possibly. Would it be "fair" to the GM and other players who are trying to imagine debates, speeches and negotiations? No. While some people's gaming styles get on just fine with social interactions abstracted like combat, many people's don't. Is that "fair" to people who aren't articulate? I guess not. But so what? Life's not fair anyway, so it might as well be fun.What you are doing here is applying principles used for awarding XP to awarding circumstance bonuses; this makes no sense. Increasing someone's chances of success because they are doing a job badly but in an authentic way is just assinine.Look: define fair and balanced. I'm getting sick of you guys claiming that being rewarded for real world proficiency at geometry, math and tactics is somehow fair but being rewarded for talent at other real world things is somehow unfair. Furthermore, these objectives are of equal importance; the solution to play-acting trumping tactical cleverness is not to simply reverse the situation and have tactical cleverness trump play-acting. D&D should be about a balance between these things. However, what particular balance is struck should be based on the social contract between GM and players in each individual gaming group.Yeah. But don't lump me in with them.</blockquote>

Verification